There are a few problems with this, though.  We work in an office building, so there’s not a whole lot of places to shoot a good headshot, and, these people are pretty important – the kind of people you are lucky to get 5 minutes with on a good day, but this wasn’t a good day, so I was lucky to get about 30 seconds per person.  Great.

So, we had to improvise.  For the location we ended up in a conference room (I bet you NEVER would have guessed that ), which didn’t leave us with a lot of options.  We had a lame (think elementary school portraits) muslin background that we could have thrown up, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.  I’d much rather have a nice, solid, neutral background.  Luckily, the conference room walls were white (or fairly close to it) so we pushed the tables out of the way to give us some working room and setup our shooting position in such a way that there wouldn’t be much light falling on the background so it would drop to a nice gray color.

So, the background was taken care of – now we just needed a good lighting setup in a tight space. Enter the speedlights and CLS!  Big studio lights and cords would have caused all kinds of problems and hazards.  Using the little battery powered strobes allowed me to set up a nice cross-light setup in a very small space that worked quite nicely for these portraits.

For the key light I set up a Nikon SB-900 inside of the 28″ Westcott Apollo softbox and set it on camera left.  I wanted a solid aperture for these portraits to keep them sharp and detailed, so I shot at f/8 at ISO 200, which is cake for the speedlights.  I had the key setup in a nice 3/4 position to provide enough light on the VP’s faces and still provide some definition via shadow.

With the key set I set up a nice kicker/fill/rim light on back camera left just to provide a little more visual interest and pop to the photos.  This was done by setting up my Nikon SB-600 on top of one of the tables we moved out of the way into a silver umbrella.  I used the umbrella to provide some spread to the second light and soften it up as corporate headshots generally don’t lend themselves well to hard directional light.

Once the lights were up it was just a matter of dialing in the power for a good exposure and waiting for the VPs to come by.  I shot tethered so I could easily check focus and exposure, plus I thought it’d make me look a little more professional, which is important when dealing with important senior management people.

Once they finally came by I got about what I thought I would get with each one – about 30-45 seconds.  I had them stand in position, shot a frame and checked and made sure everything looked good, and then fired a few more off just to be safe and moved on to the next one.  I shot 13 VPs, including the CEO, all in about 8 minutes.  That’s what happens when you work with important people.  Best to be prepared and be flexible.  I pre-planned most of this the night before so I could set up and be ready for them.  Total setup time was probably 10-15 minutes and total shooting time was no more than 10 minutes tops.  13 VPs in less than 30 minutes total from start to finish.  Not too bad.

I edited the shots in the Lightroom 3 Beta, just to give it a shot.  Lots of other people have already talked about it, so I won’t get into it here.  It’s pretty cool so far – nothing too revolutionary.  I do really like the improved sharpening, though.  I probably spent an hour total editing these shots – once I got the look I wanted it was easy to sync it with the rest and tweak the colors where needed.

After I everything I’d say this was a pretty successful shoot.  I was pretty nervous about it, but thanks to everything I’ve learned so far it was pretty easy to set something up and make some good images.

Practice makes perfect!

I’m not sure if you can really call them “published”, but I’m rolling with.  They were printed in a magazine that was distributed to at least 20,000 people, so that’s good enough for me.  The magazine in question is the “Team Spirit,” my company’s monthly publication that covers things going on in the business.  I’m guessing it’s a pretty typical corporate publication.  The one problem I have with it – the pictures that are usually in it are bad.  Really bad.  That’s wear I come in.

Now, I’m not saying I’m awesome or anything (though I do like to pretend), but I know I can do better than the stuff that usually runs in there.  Luckily for me my boss is an amateur photographer as well, so when the Internal Communications department asked him to arrange a shoot with the guys for last months feature story, he forwarded it straight to me.

The story was about our recently implemented “Order Online, Pick Up In Store” program.  Most retailers with both a web and brick-and-mortar presence (yay! for marketing class) have a similar feature these days, so in order to stay competitive we had to go along with it.  The guys involved spent A LOT of time working on so it was a no-brainer to run a feature article about it.  The director of Internal Communications wanted a technology-themed shot in order to tie the people and technology involved together.  Easy enough.  Take the guys, go to the computer room and shoot.

Except our computer room is nothing like the fancy data centers the really big companies like Google have.  So I didn’t have a lot to work with – but I was still determined to produce a better image than anything else that gets put in the “Team Spirit.”  I decided to keep it fairly simple, but still provide the tie-in between the guys and the technology.  Armed with a couple of small speedlights and the wonderful knowledge from Strobist I set out to make my pictures.

The picture above is a fairly simple two-light setup.  I stacked the guys fairly close to some exposed racks with lots of wires that would look techy to just about anyone (even though the real powerful machines are just in black cabinets).  For my key light I set up an SB-800 into a white umbrella, raised up fairly high and angled downward and away from the racks.  I wanted to feather the light as much as possible to control the spill.  Then for the fill I took a Vivitar 285HV and raised it up pretty high and just bounced it off of the white ceilings.  Nice fill and accents on the rack equipment.  Pretty simple two-light group shot.  Is it award-winning?  Hell no!  But it’s not bad and its 100 times better than the usual stuff we see in the “Team Spirit.”

After I had my safe shot done I wanted to try something a little more creative – the result of that is the image at the top of the post.

Everyone knows the blue lights mean high-tech, right?  Right?!?  Well, they do.  So, I needed some blue. Set my white balance to tungsten – instant blue.  But not blue enough.  This shot is also a two-light setup.  I set up my background light first.  I wanted it blue and glowy.  I used the Vivitar 285HV on full power with some CTB gels stacked on it.  It was behind the racks I had the guys standing in front of.  That gave me the nice blue I was looking for.  Of course it might everything blue, which I didn’t want.  For the guys I used the Nikon SB-800 with somewhere along the lines of a Full + 1/4 CTO gel at around 1/4 power through the white umbrella.  I positioned the light and feathered in such a way to try and make sure all 4 guys got an even amount of light from front to back.  Worked out pretty well.  Nice light and much higher quality than the usual.

I call the top shot the “power” shot LOL.  Makes everyone look strong and, well, powerful.  The guys liked it.  Mostly because it accents Hal‘s (the guy in front) crotch I think.  And who doesn’t love that?